We are gearing up for a major push of strategic security work and as part of the backgrounding for one of the areas I will be working on, I spent an hour of my day listening to a 2009 presentation by David Rice, author ofÂ “Geekonomics – The Real Cost of Insecure Software”. which I have embedded below. It’s on the long side at around 1 hour, but certainly worth reviewing. If you can spare an eyeball, take the time to watch the presentation as Davids style is engaging and about as far from “Death by Powerpoint” as you can get.

In typical spooky timing, a reminder about the OWASP NZ Day on July the 7th arrived in my inbox right in the middle of me watching the presentation video.

For those with an interest in security, but yet to attend an OWASP event, it’s certainly something I’d recommend (register here)- not only for the opportunity to chat to others in the industry, but for the great line up of speakers. This year, the event will again be held in Auckland and boasts the following topics:

For the developers, there are two 3 hour training courses also being held inÂ parallelÂ to the conference, but with seating limited to 20 participants per session, I’d suggest registering quickly to reserve your spot.Â More information can be found here.

The kids in Room 3 had a problem, all of the caterpillars that went into the pupa stage of their metamorphosis were emerging when the students were out of the classroom.

The solution was to setup a laptop with a web camera programmed to take a snapshot of a waiting chrysalis once every minute. These images were stitched together into a time-lapse which captured the butterfly emerging in this video.

Feel free to skip over rest of the content in this article as what is of interest will vary greatly between viewers – but I wanted to present the whole story in one location in case it is useful to others who are studying similar processes.

This video by Harvard ProfessorYoungme Moon has been sitting in my open tabs for a couple of weeks now as a irreverent reminder of the safe-play bingo phrases which find their way into so many meetings…

The embedded video came across my Twitter feed this morning (thanks @rgoodchild) under the heading of ‘The Perfect Geek Rapper’. Now while m0serious may not be in the same league as NerdCore rapper MC Frontalot,his material will still coax a smile from those of us who have an interest in site design, UI and Ux – as well as imparting some good coding behaviors…

Below is an interesting video for those caught up in the swine flu (which it isn’t) hype.
As a bit of background, Hans Rosling is a doctor and researcher who I first ‘saw’ when he presented at TED 2006 – in this video he demonstrates some really interesting data from the World Health Organisation using Gapminder to illustrate the information in an incredibly captivating manner.

Now while Hans doesn’t discount the potential future risk of Influenza A (H1N1), he does point out the hype the media is attaching to the virus when compared to other preventable causes of death.

So, the point of the post (I guess) is that while it’s great that places such as my sons day care center are reinforcing basic preventative measures such as:

Regular hand washing and drying

Covering your cough or sneeze with your arm not your hand

Keeping children with any symptoms at home until they are well.

The reality is, these are life skills which don’t need a hyped up flu variant to be taught – especially in countries with ready access to medical care, and for patients who are neither very young, nor very old.

On average, the (generic) ‘flu is caught by between 3-5 million people each year, and between 0.8 to 1% (or 250,000 to 500,000 people) die from it annually. As the video points out, Influenza A (H1N1) can only claim a mortality rate of around 0.06 to 0.25%… so where were the news stories last year, and the year before that, and the year before that? As molecular virologist Dr Christopher Olsen says in the article linked above;

‘Let’s not lose track of the fact that the normal seasonal influenza is a huge public health problem that kills tens of thousands of people in the U.S. alone and hundreds of thousands around the world,’

Calm down, wash your hands and wait for the media to start reporting on something more worthwhile like, ooh – the global financial issues which actually ARE affecting a large number of people in very real ways.

Now – while storm chasing may not strictly be the realm of geek, I’d argue that there’s a heck of a lot of technology, knowledge and innovation going on in this space – all in the aim of understanding these powerful events of nature.

For one group of storm chasers, it’s paid off and the guys in the clip below actually managed to get themselves inside a tornado – awesome!

This link has been bouncing around the NZ twitter space this morning, itâ€™s very well constructed video of a young company and their employees explaining what it means to be, and work at the company. It reminded me of my early days at an NZ IT start up, and also of the early days at Xtra when it was an ISP… great energy, great people and a desire to do the right thing for the customer â€“ letâ€™s see more NZ companies catch this bug again.

It may be the best 7 minutes you spend all day (values shown in their entirety at the 06:57 mark) – thanks to @benkepes for the heads up on this, I’m enthused once again.

"I was so freaking crunchy that I literally crumbled. It was only when I took control of those paranoid thoughts and fears about the world around me and became an objective critical thinker that I got well." Tags: vaccination Health anti-vaxxers

Using real-time solar wind data from Nasa’s ACE spacecraft, matched with data obtained from a network of magnetometers located worldwide, we are able to forecast, with reasonable accuracy, how the Southern Lights will behave up to one hour in advance Tags: aurora forecast astronomy

Snapchat, the popular photo messaging service, got a visit from the privacy Grinch this Christmas season after researchers released details of an exploit that abuses Snapchat's "Find My Friends" feature. Tags: researchers security issues SnapChat

According to internal NSA documents viewed by SPIEGEL, these on-call digital plumbers are involved in many sensitive operations conducted by American intelligence agencies. TAO's area of operations ranges from counterterrorism to cyber attacks to traditional espionage. Tags: nsa toolbox spy networks security

Schneier, who previously had served on Co3 Systems' advisory board and has helped shape the look and feel of the software-as-a-service firm's architecture, says the time had come for him to make a change and leave BT. Tags: Bruce Schneier Co3